I of course am not going to retype and plagiarize their entire list of 133 but I will give you our TOP 10!!

1. How to make sour dough bread.

Kelly and I have been making our own sprouted wheat bread for the last year.But now even this recipe is hurting Kelly’s belly.BUT!There is a baker at our farmers market that makes these gorgeous loafs of sour dough that she gobbles UP!No pain at all.So homemade sour dough bread is our biggest skill we want to master.

2. Laundry Detergent!!!

We have never been able to find or make a good laundry or dish detergent that works.We have failed miserably every time. I guess we should do some more research with our essential oils and try again.

3. Hunt and fish.

Yes, I own land and I am preparing my family to homestead full time and I have never hunted. Or even really fished.Kelly and I haven’t even eaten venison before!I’m such a “city folk”.If you are a friend of ours and you hunt…please help!Take me on a hunt!!!I want to learn! Wow, “a man needs skills”!

4. Know how to humanely clean and gut an animal.

This would be deer or a chicken or sheep or pig or anything! Again. I’ve never hunted, so I’ve never cleaned an animal.This. Will. End.I am ready to do this!

5. Basket weaving.

It was ever since I began reading Ben Hewitt’s homestead books, The Nourishing Homestead and Home Grown, as well as his blog benhewitt.net.His boys have grown up on their homestead fishing and hunting everyday of their lives. And one of the skills that they picked up was basket weaving…how cool is that?!?The skill to make any kind of basket, that just sounds like a fun and AWESOME homeschool project!!

6. How to harvest, mill, and cook with our very own mesquite tree beans.

The mesquite tree produces a very hard and difficult bean that when milled correctly gives you a magical super food!It can be a flour substitute for people that have gluten issues…like my wife!But mainly I just want to make some mesquite bean pancakes.

7. Propagate trees.

Holy cow this is a HUGE one and should be higher up for sure!With 7.5 acres we will need to be planting a whole lot of trees.Learning how to propagate soft cuttings, hard woods, suckers, root cuttings, and grafting one tree onto another will save us sooooooo much money.And even the ability to add an additional income stream.

8. Bee Keeping.

Beekeeping with Blooming Apple Trees in BackgroundOur family loves honey.We need to get us some bees up in here!

9. Carpentry and wood working skills.

Well, I’ve built a cheap work bench. Then I’ve used it to build a step stool for our kiddos! In our project of converting a shed to a tiny house we plan on building our kitchen cabinets ourselves. A man needs skills!! Here is a video by Anna White that we are using as inspiration:

10. Rain Water Harvesting.

$22,000 for a water well is insane. Yep. That is the average after getting 4 quotes. We’d have to dig down to 900ft!!!We are going to need to find some way to catch the rain and store it for our long term water usage. We already have 2-175 gallon tanks sitting on our land waiting to be used.

So what skills do you want to learn? How idiotic do you think we are about attempting this new lifestyle when we don’t even know these basic skills? Do you think we can learn all of these in a year?
Leave your comments below! Share this post on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest and we’ll see you next time!

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Hey There!

[buzzsprout episode=’1619590′ player=’true’] Transcript Welcome to the better together life podcast, a full time family and building a Texas homestead from scratch. All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the better together life podcast. We’re excited to have you. This is episode six, excuse all the background noise. The kids are doing homeschool…. Read More